


Silent & Stagnant

by Leamas



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Captivity, Dark, Drug Addiction, Harshaw Lives, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Prisoner of War, Psychological Torture, Serious Injuries, Sexual Assault as Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:34:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25099984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: Two months tortured in Fjerda, and then returning to Os Alta. Zoya is not having a good time.
Relationships: Harshaw/Zoya Nazyalensky
Kudos: 10





	Silent & Stagnant

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains violence and torture that is extensive, detailed, and obviously beyond what can be considered "canon-typical." In addition to what I've listed in the tags, this story also includes an ongoing description of addiction typical of jurda parem.
> 
> Additionally, I would like to express my thanks to [vials](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials) for pointing out what could have been a few typos that would have rather thrown the overall tone of this story... appreciated!

Three months later, Zoya slowly walked into her room, standing in the centre of it before finally taking a seat on the divan. There was no dust on the table. The air didn’t taste stale, although the windows were closed, the curtains drawn. Clearly someone had been here recently. Zoya touched the smooth fabric at the arm, staring at where her pale hand settled on the blue.

With a flick of her wrist she summoned a surge of wind that threw the flower vase from where it sat on the table, shattering the glass and spilling water onto the carpet. The clatter echoed around the room. Zoya stared at the mess she’d made, watching as a single letter that someone had tucked under the vase settled on the ground.

An unearthly silence had descended upon the room from the moment that she’d shut the door. The first quiet moment that Zoya had experienced in months, it did not feel peaceful. Even alone in her cell, there had always been the steady flow of water down the far wall that at first she’d thought would drive her insane, but that later served as a better focal point than her own body; she could recall many moments when she felt the cool liquid travel down the rough walls of her prison cell more acutely than she felt the rough floor against her own skin. Other times the opposite had been true: in the dark, she’d not entirely believed that anything else existed past the boundary of her own skin, the sound of her strained and heavy breathing the loudest thing in the world, along with the whooshing in her head. But moments like those had come only towards the end of her captivity, when weeks of torture and starvation and being deprived of the use of her power had weakened her to the point where she could scarcely raise her head. After she was wounded past the point that were she _otkazat’sya_ she would have died, when she’d been beaten so hard as punishment that she’d forgotten her own name.

Abruptly Zoya stood. It was over, yet even as she told herself this, a heaviness fell across her shoulders as she looked around the room. In the two weeks before she was able to return to Os Alta as part of the deal struck with Fjerda, she’d been left mostly alone but fed a steady diet to put on the weight that she’d lost; allowed to drink as much cool water and tea as she’d wanted, and to sleep. And finally she was allowed to use her powers, after months of being kept with her hands restrained. Much of Zoya’s strength had returned, yet when she looked around this that was hers, that she had claimed and designed as a reflection of _her_ , she felt empty. There was absolutely nothing that Zoya wanted to do. Even to lay down and let the evening pass uneventfully until it was time for her to be debriefed the next morning, waiting that long in this stillness made her want to scream.

“You would think,” she said aloud to that stillness, “that I would be used to waiting patiently, after two months of doing nothing else.”

Predictably, there was no response.

What she really needed was a bath. She’d been scrubbed clean before being delivered back to Ravka, and since then allowed to wash herself, but all of that had been done with methodical care. The only thing that sounded remotely appealing right now was the possibility of finally being clean, and warm, with the water carrying some of her weight.

Zoya called for a bath to be drawn, looking through her own clothes while she waited. She ran the silk nightgown through her fingers, then returned it to where it hung in her closet. Summer was almost over now, with evenings growing colder. It was her usual night attire, but right now she wanted something else.

A knock at the door jerked Zoya’s attention away from her clothing. She pulled herself away from her closet and opened the door, to see one of the servants standing in front of her.

“General Nazyalensky,” the woman said. She handed Zoya a warm towel, which Zoya took, but she didn’t leave.

“Something else?” Zoya asked crisply.

“It’s good to have you back,” she said. “I knew that you’d make it back in one piece.”

She gave a tight smile as she said it, looking up at Zoya with a fierce relief. What did this woman expect Zoya to say to this?

“If they had plans to kill me then they would have done so within the first week,” Zoya said. “After that, I knew that I wasn’t in any real danger.”

“We can’t all be you. I would have been scared, regardless.”

She didn’t remember feeling scared. Zoya knew that it had hurt, but it didn’t feel any more real than standing here, in her own room, after being so long away.

The bathroom was warm and steamy. Zoya waited until the windows were suitably foggy before pulling off her jacket, and then her shirt. Her shoulders burned when she pulled her undershirt over her head, the scars on her back pulling painfully, and just that left her breathless and leaning against the sink until the blackness around her vision faded, but she managed. When she slid out of her pants she sat on the lip of the bathtub, peeling them down over the burns on her thigh. Her hand ghosted over where a wound should have been on her stomach, feeling only smooth, healed skin instead.

It was with some reluctance that she finally slid into the bathtub. Zoya grimaced, bracing herself against a pain that she expected to sear through her back as soon as she was in the hot water. Her new scars were becoming old: no longer open wounds, they were still sensitive to the heat in a way that tingled, reminding her uncomfortably that they were there, but there was respite as she settled into the water, as if her skin suddenly fit differently. Better. She felt warm for the first time in a long time, aware of all the aches from travelling but not the exhaustion that had become familiar.

Zoya couldn’t say for sure how long she would have stayed in the bath, but a knock at the door eventually interrupted her drifting thoughts. She sat up, leaning on the rim of the bathtub, and glared towards the door that attached to her bedroom, frowning.

She could just leave it. No one bothered her after she went to bed unless it was important, but there was no way that anyone would be coming to her with anything now. Instead she pushed herself out of the bathtub, reaching for a towel and quickly drying herself. She dressed quickly, pulling on her heavy robe and tying it tightly around herself. It was still new to her to have hair that only just reached her shoulders, the gnarled mess of tangles and matted blood cut away by the Fjerdan women who had first scrubbed away the grime and filth and blood that covered her, trying to make her look presentable again before giving her back. Let it not be said that Fjerda returned Ravka’s things back to her, broken. She was able to dry it quickly, though, and loosen any tangles just by running her hands through it a few times.

Genya was standing on the other side of the door.

“I didn’t think that I’d have to see anyone until tomorrow,” Zoya said.

“Call me impatient,” Genya said. “I wanted to see you tonight.”

“It’s late,” Zoya asked, but she let Genya into her room. She leaned back on her heel as she watched Genya look around. A flicker of irritation flashed through her—what did Genya want?

Her gaze passed over to the shattered vase, then back to Zoya.

“Do you want me to call someone for that?”

“I’ll deal with it,” Zoya said. “Why are you here?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Genya said. “I was looking for Nikolai. Thought that if he’d be anywhere, then this would be it.”

A flicker of a smile twitched at the side of Zoya’s mouth. “Nikolai can wait.”

“But you’ll make time for me?” Genya asked sweetly. Then her face softened. “I won’t ask if you’re okay, because I know that you’re not.”

“I’m fine.”

“You will be.”

“I’m alive,” Zoya said. “It sucked, but I didn’t expect hospitality. I wasn’t afraid.”

She thought that Genya would say something else—that she would argue with Zoya. But instead Genya nodded. “You’re strong.”

“You’re the second person to say that to me tonight.”

“It’s true,” Genya said. “I wanted to see you. I couldn’t really believe that you were here.”

Zoya glanced at the clock. “It feels like I never left.”

“Yeah.”

Neither woman said anything for a moment. Zoya studied Genya’s hair with a steady gaze, noting all of the stray hairs that had come loose from where it was pinned into a knot at the back of her head. She must have been in the labs today, with David. For some reason this annoyed Zoya, although she couldn’t say why.

“It’s late.” Zoya walked away from the door towards the coffee table. She kicked a shard of the vase out of the way, then bent down to lift up the envelope that had been sat on the table before she’d knocked it away. The handwriting on the front was familiar, and she pocketed it. “I’m going to spend all day tomorrow being debriefed, and I want to rest.”

“Of course,” Genya said. “There’s one other reason that I’m here.”

“Is my company not enough?”

“Do you want me to take care of your scars?”

Zoya froze. “That’s certainly a presumptuous offer to make.”

“I know what it’s like,” Genya said softly. “I can grow your hair out to the way that it used to be, too.”

Without thinking too much about it, Zoya reached to her shoulder and brushed her fingers through it. She hadn’t resisted when it had been hacked away. It was still uneven, choppy. She tucked her hands in front of her, leaning on one hip and frowning at Genya. “Do I look like I need your help?”

“You still look beautiful, Zoya,” Genya said. “A few scars aren’t going to change that. But I can still see proof of what happened to you all over your body, and that isn’t nice to live with.”

_You don’t know the half of what happened to me._

Zoya shook her head, then sat on the divan. “Fine. Do what you will, but try to hurry. It’s been months since I’ve slept in my own bed. I’ve missed it.”

Genya joined Zoya, sitting next to her. “Can you take off your robe?”

Zoya moved in a series of jerky motions, untying the rope around her waist and then pulling it over her shoulders stiffly. She was not going to let herself hesitate with something as simple as this. She wore a light tank top that had always been loose on her, that now hung off of Zoya’s bony frame with too much room. Gathering up her usual intensity from sheer habit, Zoya studied Genya’s gaze, scrutinising Genya’s face as she studied the new scars that covered Zoya.

Zoya knew that it was bad. That was no surprise. Dark skin wrapped around Zoya’s throat from the abrasions caused by rope, and a ring of scars wrapped around her wrists. Running through her left arm were a number of deep scars; when she looked at them, she still expected to see the knife that put them there and was surprised to find that this wasn’t the case. The remains of lacerations from her back stretched around her shoulders. It was nowhere near as bad as what it had been like when she’d first been carved into and bled, but it wasn’t good either. Zoya had not wanted to be touched by any of the Heartrenders or Healers brought to collect her, and so they had repaired the damage to her wrists and shoulders as quickly as possible, but not tailored anything.

Genya didn’t look horrified, nor disgusted. Instead she looked focused. She was in her element here. It was strictly business. Still, Zoya was relieved when Genya finally raised her hand, and with a gentle warning that she was about to touch Zoya, lay her hand across the base of her neck. A tingling warmth followed, making Zoya swallow. It itched, and soon that feeling travelled around to the back of her neck. When Genya pulled her hand away a moment later, Zoya touched the skin that Genya had just been working on, only to find that the rough collar of calloused skin was gone.

“Do you want to see a mirror?”

“I’ll look at the end,” Zoya said. “Just keep working.”

“Yes, Lady Nazyalensky.”

It was tedious work, but Genya was effective and efficient. She worked through each scar individually, smoothing the skin and repairing the discolouration. Where Zoya’s forearms had been broken and roughly repaired, Genya straightened them further, and where a knife had been driven through her wrist Genya softened the skin until there was nothing left to it. By the time that Genya was finished there was no trace of what had been done to Zoya’s arms. It surprised Zoya to find that she was reluctant to let Genya touch the multitude burn scars on her chest, after having allowed Genya to see to her wrist so easily. She’d never been shy about that part of her body, but now found herself gritting her teeth while Genya repaired each one. At one point Zoya almost told Genya to forget about it, but the truth was that she liked to wear dresses with plunging necklines, and she didn’t want to contend with them every time that she attended a ball or another function. As Genya said: it would be obvious what had been done to her, and it was no one’s business how many times that bastard Fjerdan had burnt her with the end of his knife.

Genya finished quickly. “There,” she said. “Turn around and I’ll take care of the scars on your back—”

“No,” Zoya said. “It’s fine. You’ve done enough.”

At first Genya hesitated. Then she said, “If you want to wait for a moment before I—”

“No,” Zoya repeated. “I told you that you’ve done enough. You don’t need to do anything else. And don’t you dare touch my back.”

She thought that Genya would argue, and was ready to throw the other woman from her room by force if necessary, but Genya dropped the subject quickly, the intense look of professional concentration falling from her face. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s the case, then I’m done. You look really good, Zoya.”

Zoya pulled her robe back over her shoulders. “When do I not?”

“What about your hair, though?”

“I think I like it this way,” Zoya said absently. “May as well have some fun with it until it grows back.”

“You’ll have to let me try some new styles on you,” Genya said. “There are so many things that would look good on you, but the way that it was before was just too long to do anything like that.”

Genya’s smile didn’t look fake, but it looked half-hearted. Behind her carefully friendly expression, Zoya saw too many things that her friend wasn’t saying. She had half a mind to tell Genya to just spit it out already, so that they could get whatever this was over with, but she didn’t want to hear what Genya had to say.

That was why Genya hadn’t said anything, either.

A tightness settled in Zoya’s throat, but her eyes remained dry, her breath steady.

“I’ll think about it,” Zoya said. “Submit your suggestions and give me five to ten business days to review them.”

“As you wish, General,” Genya said. “But it _is_ late, and you _are_ tired. I’m sure that you’re looking forward to tomorrow…” When Zoya said nothing, Genya just straightened her kefta and carried on. “I’ll see you then. If you need anything else from me, just say. You deserve it.”

 _You say that now_ , Zoya thought—but wouldn’t let herself think of that any more.

Genya showed herself out, clicking the door shut behind her. A moment later Zoya stood and pressed her ear against the door, listening, but there was nothing there, so Zoya quickly locked it. She walked back to the divan and fell onto her back.

Hard to believe that Genya had been here only a moment before. There was only the stillness and the silence, two heavy, oppressive forces.

She reached for the letter that she’d picked up from the table, turning it over in her hand. The edges of the envelope where wet, now, from where it had fallen alongside the shattered vase. Her name was written in spiky letters. With a sigh, she set it back on the table.

As exhausted as Zoya was, sleeping was laughable. She wished that Genya had never touched her, for whatever ease had come to her in the bath had vanished. She was cold, but had no desire even to wrap her robe around herself again.

There had to be someplace that she could go tonight, rather than just sit here alone, but when she tried to think, it was as though she were constantly forgetting.

* * *

Pain burned across Zoya’s back as the whip fell on her bare skin. She grunted, bracing her legs so that she didn’t fall and hang her weight on the chains binding her arms above her. Two nights ago they’d snapped her wrists when she’d lashed out during the brief time where they’d untied her so that she could eat the pathetic portion of bread and soup that they brought her. That pain was unbearable, but it reached a plateau and didn’t get any worse. She’d been left alone since then, with her wrists bound in front of her body. If she didn’t move then the pain was steady, measured by her even breaths. It was only after the second day when no one had come to her that the relief ebbed again, for Zoya had become thirsty, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth and a new nausea crawling through her. The water that she’d been given this morning was a relief, in that respect, even if she’d not been able to hold the cup to drink it: it was possible to ignore the hand at the back of her neck while she gulped down mouthful after mouthful of water. Only when it was pulled away from her and she tried to follow did the full weight of her shame collide against her, as she realised how desperate she’d just been, but she’d not had time to think about it anymore before a boot crashed against the side of her face and everything went black.

Her wrists were still broken. If she held her arms still, and didn’t let the brunt force of the whip push her forward, then it was bearable.

The whip fell again, and again Zoya was able to brace herself, offering nothing more than a grunt.

Her back was on fire, but the pain was sharp. It lanced through the agony that had made itself at home in the rest of her, lighting up her back until everything else became background noise. The ground was solid beneath her feet, and the rope was above her, dragging pain from her hands. Again she heard the whip as it hissed through the air, then felt the impact. She couldn’t brace herself this time, and stumbled forward, rolling her right ankle beneath her. She would have fallen to one knee, were the rope that held her long enough, but instead her broken wrists took her full weight.

Zoya gradually became aware of the hard, rough floor under her shoulder, and the cold that settled over her warm, sweating skin. Somewhere in the room they were talking. She turned to look up, over her shoulder, trying to make out anything in the flickering lights.

The _drüskelle_ who visited her most days, who seemed to be assigned to her, stood only a few feet from her—the more savage one, Albrecht, who would slam her head against the wall of her cell when he’d bring her water, and once spent an evening with his boot at her throat, threatening for hours to crush her if she so much as twitched without permission—but he was looking to the door where another one was talking to a man who wore a different uniform. She tried to fix him with a glare, one final defiance, but none of the _drüskelle_ were looking at her.

A young woman was there. Staring ahead of her, her gaze was sightless; she wasn’t entirely present. She wore a simple grey dress, and had long, drab hair that fell over her shoulders. She was exceedingly thin, enough so that Zoya didn’t know how she was still alive. And there was something about her face that was distinctly not Fjerdan, and it took Zoya a moment to realise that this young woman was Ravkan, like her.

 _Another one of us_ , Zoya said. She knew without needing to be told that this woman was Grisha, as well; why else would she be here?

The _drüskelle_ that Zoya didn’t recognised turned his attention to her. “Like we told you, blood witch.”

The young woman groaned, but stuttered forward. Her feet dragged behind her, but she made it several steps before she threw forward her hands. 

Zoya screamed. Every second of pain that she’d felt before paled in comparison to the agony that now ran through her. There was no injury, no cause for it, but it was there, closer to Zoya than the sweat and blood that coated her skin. There was no comparison to this. Her own body generated pain, burned with it, and it filled every inch of Zoya’s skin until there was no room left for her.

When finally it eased again she was heaving. Her eyes were wet, and she could not seem to summon even a lungful of air. She looked up, terrified that it would happen again, and watched in horror as this woman drew nearer. Zoya wanted to pull away but remained trapped in place, unable or unwilling to move.

Finally, the young woman knelt in front of Zoya, then reached for Zoya’s wrist. Her hand was cold to the touch, like ice.

“Need something for the rope,” the woman said, in a low and raspy voice that was nonetheless familiar.

Whatever breath remained in Zoya’s body fled. She was staring into the face of Nina Zenik. She stared into Zoya’s face with a wild madness that Zoya had never seen before—not on a person, at least—but it was her.

Albrecht stalked up to the pair of them, pulling a knife from his belt and holding it out to Nina. She took it and sliced the ropes away from Zoya’s wrists, then gripped her wrists tightly. Heat radiated from where Nina touched her, but a moment passed and the pain vanished. Feeling had returned to her fingers. Her wrists were healed.

Zoya sat up and pushed herself into a crouch, bracing herself. She didn’t use her powers; let them think that she learned her lesson. She would wait, until she knew more.

She looked from Nina, to Albrecht, to the senior _drüskelle_ that Zoya had never seen before.

“Go on,” he said, nodding.

Nina stood in front of Zoya. It was no wonder that Zoya hadn’t recognised her at first. She was still so thin now, her skin a pale grey. Her nails were broken, and nail marks ran over the backs of her hands and her face. The wild look in her eyes didn’t ease; she looked more nervous now, constantly looking over her shoulder to the _drüskelle_ who had brought her here.

“When—”

“After you do what I told you,” he snapped.

Nina turned her attention back to Zoya. “Stand,” she ordered, and Zoya felt her legs obey. “Walk to the door. Kneel, and hold your hands behind your back.”

“No,” Zoya said, even as her legs pushed her to her feet. She walked, the ground unsteady beneath her. She didn’t think that she could stop walking, but she also couldn’t hold a thought past the fact that she _was_ walking. Something was _wrong_ and _she_ _knew this_ , but every time that she almost grasped it, the thought vanished. Whatever pain she felt was secondary to the way that she was being moved, wrong and twisted and by her own volition.

Zoya knelt, bowing her head, and tucked her healed wrists at the small of her back.

For a moment nothing happened. The slick of her own blood dribbled down her skin, onto her own hands, and Zoya felt the beginnings of panic seized her. It wouldn’t be hard to stand, if she wanted to, and she knew that she should want to, but the steps that she would need to do that were not there.

“Look at me, Witch General.”

She raised her head defiantly, looking into the cruel eyes of this stranger. “What do you think of it?”

“What have you done to her?” Zoya snarled.

Anger flooded through her as he smiled down at her, a condescending look as though she were just a confused child. “Has Ravka heard of _jurda parem_?”

At the word Nina groaned from somewhere behind Zoya. Then she heard a loud smack, skin against skin, and an order for Nina to shut her mouth if she ever wanted another fix again.

“You’re going to explain it to me.”

His smile widened. “Am I?” he asked. “Or maybe I’ll show you.”

She tried to discern what it was that she saw on his face, but could identify nothing. Only a savage, sadistic malice that she had become very familiar with over the last few weeks. A horrible glee.

“Nina!” he barked. “Explain it to her.”

“It’s a drug,” Nina said from somewhere behind Zoya. “They give it to you like a powder. The whole world changes, and you can understand it more. Everything looks real for the first time. You can see everything. I’m stronger now. I’m stronger… stronger than… I’m everything.” Her voice was sluggish, the words slurring together until finally she broke off into a desperate cry. “Please, I need more, I can’t live without more, I’ll do anything that you want—”

“Shatter her spine.”

Pain lanced through Zoya’s back, like having the wind knocked from her body except much, much worse. Zoya fell forward, at the _drüskelle’s_ feet. It didn’t hurt, but it should. She tried to speak, but couldn’t even draw a breath. It was then that fear seized her. She couldn’t feel any of her body except for the cool floor against her face. There was no pain, but her body was gone; she couldn’t even lift her head to look around herself. Couldn’t breathe, either. She looked frantically around herself, panicking.

“Now heal her.”

As quickly as it took for Zoya’s body to break, she felt every part of her come together again and become _herself._ It hurt, terribly. She groaned, then rolled onto her side, drawing in lungful of cold, foul air that had never tasted sweeter before.

When she opened her eyes she saw that sharp face look down at her. “There you go, Witch General. Have you ever wanted power like that?”

Fury seized her. “What have you _done_?”

“Watch this,” he said, then looked to Nina. “Take this!” he called, throwing something to her from his pocket. It was a small vial that she caught from the air, her hands shaking as she drew it closer to herself with the same obsession as a lover. She crouched over it, unscrewing the cap, then swallowed all of it.

When she sank down to her knees, it was with a sigh of relief. Emaciated, weak, her face the colour of the dead—it made no difference. In that moment Nina looked more at peace with the world than anyone that Zoya had ever seen.

“Nina,” she croaked. “Kill them, and we’ll run.”

“Do you hear that, Nina?” Albrecht asked. “She wants to take you away from _parem_.”

Nina’s rapt attention snapped forward, fixing on Zoya. She raised an arm without hesitating, and Zoya felt her throat close.

“None of that!” the senior _drüskelle_ snapped, and Nina dropped her hand immediately and looked down at the ground in front of her. She grabbed a long strand of her now-thinning hair, running her fingers through it.

Zoya couldn’t tear her gaze away, despite wanting to look anywhere else. For a moment she thought that it was something that Nina had done to her, again, but a hand at the back of her head, grasping a fistful of her tangled, bloody black hair snapped her out of the trance. Zoya was dragged to her feet; thrown forward.

She caught herself, and braced herself in a fighting stance.

None of the _drüskelle_ there looked worried. And why would they, when they had Nina under their control? Their perfect weapon, who had loved Zoya once. Her gaze travelled to Zoya, and she felt a knot form at her throat.

She could have told herself that this was a stranger: no less important, but not someone that Zoya had already lost all of those months ago, on the Wandering Isle. But just then Nina raised her head to look back at Zoya, a quiet desperation radiating from her. She opened her mouth just barely, mouthing two words to Zoya before tilting her head back and staring up at the ceiling. Her breathing was heavy. She clenched and unclenched her fists at her side.

The senior _drüskelle_ walked up behind Zoya, grabbing her now-mended wrist and pulling it behind her back. He pulled the other behind, too, and bound her wrists together. Then he slapped her wounded back, releasing a hiss of pain from her.

“Now,” he said, wiping her own blood on her bare shoulder, “you know what _parem_ is.”

* * *

After Zoya finished her explanation, she looked directly at Nikolai. “Now you know what _parem_ is. Unless you already knew, and just hadn’t got around to telling me.”

Slowly, Nikolai exhaled. To his credit, he didn’t look away from her. “Maybe, Zoya. There were rumours. Nothing that we could verify.”

“I can verify it.”

“And we believe you.”

“When we first heard of _parem_ ,” said Tamar, “it sounded a lot like false information. A drug that makes Grisha insanely powerful, before killing them? It would enslave our entire army. If it was real, then it would be a worthy threat, but if it wasn’t…”

“It would be a very good way to send us searching for a threat that isn’t there,” Tolya said.

“It is real,” Zoya insisted. “I saw it. It’s there. I saw what it did to people. Whatever it is that you’ve heard, the truth is far worse than you could imagine.” She clenched and unclenched her hand, the memory of what it was for her shattered bones to lance through her arms all too fresh. “They want you to know that it’s real,” Zoya said, “and that they’re making progress about how to weaponise it.”

Nikolai nodded. “If that’s why they were stupid enough to send you back, then then can consider their message received. If I were feeling more generous, then I’d say that I hoped it was worth it…”

“It won’t be,” Zoya said, clipped. “I’ll see to that.”

The enduring silence that had stayed with Zoya the night before followed her into the room, crowding her words out of it. She looked across each of the faces of her colleagues, studying their faces for some reaction.

Nikolai had opted to debrief her in one of the lesser-used rooms, towards the back of the Grand Palace. The room was bright, with the windows thrown open and a light breeze drafting through the windows that were only closed on the latch. From here, Zoya could see the lake and the pavilions. There was a clear view of the Little Palace, and the clouds that passed lazily along the horizon. She felt the air change and churn with the same acute attention as she felt the table under her hands and the pinch of her toes in her shoes. It called to her, and she ached for how much she longed to answer it.

“Zoya,” David said.

“What?”

“What exactly does _parem_ do to a Grisha’s power?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “There didn’t seem to be a limit to what she could do.”

“She was a Heartrender?” Tolya asked.

“Yes.”

“Anyone that we know?” Tamar asked.

“Does it make a difference?” Zoya snapped. “We don’t offer sanctuary to Grisha just because we know them and personally care about them. She could be anyone and it would still be an attack against us.”

“No one’s saying otherwise,” Tamar said. “I only wanted to know what it is that the Fjerdans might have known, if they have any of our soldiers.”

“I didn’t know her,” Zoya said. “They might have others of ours, but no one that I saw.”

The lie was not harmless, Zoya knew, but she wasn’t going to speak Nina’s name here. Zoya had no doubt that Nina had been convinced to tell everything that she knew about Ravka, with only the promise of another vial of _parem_ on the line. There was nothing that Nina wouldn’t have done. But she didn’t know anything that was worth bringing it to Tamar here. There was no need as to why Nina needed to be remembered like that.

“What about the Fjerdan soldiers that you saw?” Tamar asked. “The _drüskelle_? If you saw any of them now, would you be able to recognise them?”

Zoya nodded.

“I apologise if this is an insensitive question,” Tamar went on, “but whatever information we have would be helpful.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“Any information that you can give us would help.”

Zoya wanted to demand why it was that Tamar wanted to know, but one look at the spymaster told her that it would be a bad idea. Tamar was cool and efficient; so was Zoya. They had an understanding, comprising two of the three strongest Grisha in the Little Palace at any given time. It was never something that Zoya had ever explicitly said to Tamar, as she didn’t consider the Heartrender a friend per se, but Zoya trusted Tamar’s strength and intelligence. When it was a question of Ravka’s safety, that was more important than anything else.

What Tamar asked was very little. She worked at the boundary between facts and hearsay. Zoya was one of the few people who could tell Tamar anything useful. It was her duty, as much as this Saintsforsaken debriefing.

“I’ll write it all for you,” Zoya said. “If you must know.”

The words were forced and hollow in Zoya’s mouth, but if anyone else noticed then they said nothing.

“That should be fine,” Nikolai said. “Unfortunately, that’s far from everything that we must discuss.”

“Predictably,” she said. “You love torturing us all through long meetings.”

Nikolai paused in shuffling the papers in front of him, before setting the stack of papers down on the table in front of him. “Arguably, yes. I’ve been known to deploy this when I need to get my way. I can promise you, though, Zoya, that I want to be here as little as you do.”

_You don’t want to know. I don’t want to tell you. But I was tortured, and now it’s my duty to relieve that for you._

“We’ll see,” Zoya said, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms. “What’s next?”

Genya was looking at her; Zoya tried to ignore her. With David here, it was like being on trial.

“Understand that I mean this as strictly a professional interest,” Tamar said, “with no judgement cast on you, regardless of what you say.”

“Get on with it.”

“Did you divulge any information that could be considered sensitive?”

Zoya rolled her eyes. “You can’t honestly expect me to remember everything that I said for the two months that I was there.”

“No,” Tamar said, “but I am going to have to ask you to try.”

Tamar and Tolya left first, after Zoya finished answering everything that was asked of her that morning, to an extent. She’d been offered the opportunity to report directly to Tamar to do this privately, but had rejected it. The others would know, anyway, and she wanted to be there as they learned all of those stupid, asinine details that all felt very unimportant, like castoff. She wanted to face them all at once, to set the record straight. 

The fact that she’d been tortured was an afterthought. Zoya had nothing more to say about it. It was not relevant to the situation at hand. When she said that a Corporalki on _parem_ could break every bone instantaneously and then heal it just as quickly, there was no need to clarify that Zoya knew because it had been done to her. When she described the basic conditions of the prison, it was unstated that Zoya knew because she had been a prisoner. There was no need to discuss the boring details, because torture was the same everywhere. It barely mattered what Zoya did. The worst beating that Zoya endured, that nearly killed her, was insignificant. 

_Now they know,_ Zoya thought as she watched Genya leave. She had her own duties that needed to be attended. _They know as much as they will ever know._

It was far from everything. Zoya had gotten away with saying very little compared to what actually happened, or what it was like to live through it. With that in mind, she should be grateful that this was all that was asked of her.

“If there’s nothing else that you have to say,” Nikolai said, “then you’re dismissed. Spend as long as you need to rest and recover.”

“How long do you intend to keep me as an invalid?”

“Until you can return to your duties,” Nikolai said. “I won’t patronise you, Zoya. Anyone else would be on their ass for a month, at least, before they even began to recover. You’re better than that.”

Zoya met Nikolai’s gaze and refused to look away. “I could return to my duties now.”

“I admire your dedication, but let’s not be that stupid,” he said. “It’s been months since you used your powers regularly. This can’t be rushed, as much as we want to. I need you back at your strongest and ready to fight for me.”

“For Ravka, you mean.”

“Same difference.”

“I might be your General,” Zoya said, “but I serve this country before I serve you.”

“I am sure that Ravka himself would kiss your feet, given half the opportunity,” Nikolai said lightly, “but as it is, the most that I can offer you instead is the time that you need to recover.”

There was something in his gaze that Zoya wanted to smack off his face—an unasked question, an unstated pity. Is that really what he thought of her? After everything? She’d prefer that he just go back to pretending that nothing had really happened to her, and to do a better job at faking that as well.

She stood. “Am I dismissed, Your Majesty?”

“Do what you want,” Nikolai said. “If there’s anything that you need—”

“Rest,” she said, “and better food than what I was given on the road. Do not try to say that it was meant to help me.”

“Whatever you need,” Nikolai repeated. “Take it.”

Zoya was halfway down the hall before she heard the sound of footsteps fast approaching from behind her. She turned abruptly, expecting to see Nikolai, but instead finding herself face-to-face with David.

Zoya stopped where she stood and crossed her arms. “Are you in a hurry, Kostyk?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Walk with me. I’m going back to the labs.”

She had nowhere else to be, so she followed him. He spoke quickly.

“You remember the civil war,” David said. “Any of us would have done anything for power at the time.”

“We weren’t going to kill the Darkling by being kind.”

“If we’d have had the choice to use _parem_ at the time, then Alina would have tried.”

“To save us.” Zoya laughed harshly. “No, instead she only did _merzost_. Brought Morozova’s amplifiers together. Cost herself all of her power.”

“That is the cost,” David said. “There is always a cost. When the Darkling asked me to be the one to put the Stag’s antlers on Alina, I didn’t think about why he wanted that power. I just knew that it was there. I had the chance to work with Ilya Morozova’s amplifiers. I wasn’t going to say no.”

“You couldn’t have said no.”

“No. I was always going to say yes.”

“I mean,” Zoya said, irritable, “that no one refused the Darkling’s wishes. You know what happened to the people that tried.”

“I wouldn’t have said no.” When David spoke it was always with a methodical calmness that never seemed to shake nor waver. Now it was with a certainty that Zoya had seen in him before, separate from his speculation and thoughtful observation of facts, when anyone made Genya uncomfortable or implied that she was in any way tainted or unworthy. There was conviction there. “Even now,” he went on, “if I was offered the chance to work with Morozova’s amplifiers—I don’t think that I would resist, even though I know that it ended with what happened in Novokribirsk, and then everything after.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zoya scoffed, bristling. She had never resented David that; never resented Alina that, either, because it was no one’s fault except the Darkling’s. “If you hadn’t done it, then he would have killed you and seduced someone else to do his bidding. That’s how he worked.”

“I know. I still would have said yes. I just wanted to illustrate that you didn’t fail that Corporalki just because you haven’t saved everyone yet.”

Zoya sucked in a deep breath. There was a lot that she wanted to say to David at that moment. She settled simply for, “You know nothing about it.”

David shrugged. He was looking at the ground, not directly at her. “I only know what you’ve told us. It isn’t a lot, but I know you. Anyway, we’re here now. I need to go.”

Zoya stood at the end of the hallway, watching David vanish into the labs. She should say something, or be angry that he would presume to understand anything about what it had been like. At the very least, she should be angry on Nina’s behalf, that David would absolve Zoya of all responsibility without even knowing all of the facts.

She wasn’t.

* * *

For several days Zoya was left alone. No food was brought to her, nor was there any water. With her recently mended wrists, it was at least bearable: she was able to crawl to the far wall of her cell, where a trickle of water ran down the side of the altered wall, collecting gritty water in her palms that she could drink. It was never enough; it was its own kind of torture to be forced to wait for her hands to fill so slowly while her parched throat burned and her tongue tasted nothing but the thick, pasty inside of her mouth, but Zoya had nothing else to do. Other than that she just lay there, too weak to even sit up for too long. Every time that she heard footsteps in the hallway she braced herself for someone coming to her, and when the footsteps passed by her cell she lay for hours waiting for her heartrate to settle.

The waiting was unbearable.

When they finally came for her, it was so much worse.

She pushed herself off the ground and braced herself, waiting for the door to swing open. With her hands bound, and weak, this would do no good, but she wasn’t going to just lay there and let this happen to her. She wouldn’t take this lying down, even if it felt like inviting the inevitable.

Albrecht was there, unsurprisingly, but rather than one of the other _drüskelle_ that came to her in turn, the senior _drüskelle_ followed him into her cell, dragging Nina along behind them.

He shoved Nina forward, and ordered her to her knees.

“I forgot to ask,” he said. “Did you know Nina?”

“She was a soldier in the Second Army, at some point.”

“You don’t remember her?”

“I’m not close to every Grisha that passes through Ravka. There are too many of us for that. You’ll never kill us all, you know.”

He sneered. “We’ll see. What about you, Nina? Do you remember General Nazyalensky?”

Zoya grimaced at the sound of her name.

“Yes,” said Nina. “I loved her.”

“Do you still?”

“Yes?” she said, guessing for the right answer. “Maybe? I don’t know. I don’t think about her anymore. I think that I still love her—”

“Would you kill her if I said that you would get this, if you did?”

He pulled out a vial, holding them up for Zoya to see before returning them to his pocket. Nina had turned over her shoulder, a perverse look of hope etched across her face. She pushed herself to her feet and raised her hands.

“I want her alive,” he said, “but screaming.”

Zoya only had a moment to brace herself for the searing agony that followed. Again it overwhelmed her, spreading through her whole body. There was nothing left of her that could think of anything else, but that was not enough to shield her from the magnitude of pain.

She came to heaving, having fallen forward onto the floor.

“Get her up,” the senior _drüskelle_ said. “Not you, Albrecht. Nina. Bring her over here.”

“Zoya, stand. Come here. Kneel.”

Without thinking, Zoya obeyed. The echoes of pain still rippled through her. It didn’t feel like her body that moved, but there was no reason that it shouldn’t be. When she fell to her knees, a shock ran through her thighs and she groaned.

Albrecht walked around so that he stood behind her, putting his rough hand on the top of her still-lacerated back. She glared ahead of her.

“Everyone knows about you,” the senior _drüskelle_ said. “General Nazyalensky. The strongest Grisha in the world, we say. And here you are. On the ground like the animal that you are. Obeying like a dog. What could we do if we had you in our hands, as obedient as Nina?”

Nina whimpered, but Zoya ignored her. He had withdrawn one of the vials and held it out in front of him. He made a gesture towards Albrecht, who grabbed a fistful of Zoya’s hair and shook her. As his superior approached, he held her very still, forcing her head up so that she could only look above her.

He held it over her face. “Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know what it’s like to have true power?”

“I’m strong enough,” Zoya snarled, willing herself to pull away, but Albrecht’s grip on her hair was relentless. “I don’t need anything that you have to give us.”

“Maybe you don’t,” he said. “I will never understand the way of witches.”

There was hatred in his face—pure hatred that was different to what Zoya saw in Albrecht’s face when he looked at her, and he was always watching her when they were in the room together. She fascinated him; it was something that she was familiar enough with that she no longer questioned it. This man, though, despised her.

He held the vial over her face. “Open your mouth, Witch General, or I’ll break your jaw.”

Zoya squeezed her lips together, trying to force her head to the side. A stab of panic gripped her. With her bound hands she reached for Albrecht’s hands, burying her nails in his wrist. She knew that she should be able to kick her legs out, and roll to the side, but she’d forgotten how to do that.

Albrecht brought his elbow down on her shoulder, deadening her arms, then grabbed her under her jaw and forced her head still.

“Hurt her, Nina.”

The pain was so much that Zoya almost passed out, but if she did then he would force this on her. She would be turned against Ravka, used to take apart everything that she had spent her whole life trying to work towards. Zoya had to fight this. There was no other option. She refused to let herself meet Nina’s fate.

“What can you do, Witch?” he said. “Will you beg? Do you think it would do you any good”

He must have seen something flash across her face, for his smile widened. Despair flooded through Zoya, momentarily eclipsing the pain.

“Let her speak.” Albrecht pulled her hand away. “Go on. This is your last chance.”

Zoya drew a shuddering breath. She didn’t know what to say. _Something—anything._

“Don’t,” she managed. “Please.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“ _Please_. Don’t force me.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think it will be like?” When Zoya didn’t answer immediately, he added, “Give me an idea. Otherwise we can find out for yourself.”

“I don’t want it to hurt,” she said. “I don’t want to become like her.”

“Nina?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure that you don’t remember her?”

“Her name is Nina Zenik. She was a Heartrender, assumed dead or kidnapped in the Wandering Isles.”

“I thought you would remember her.”

“Please,” Zoya said, her voice rasping. She had never begged in her life; she wasn’t good at it. But she had to try. “ _Please_.”

“What should we do with you instead, Witch?”

“You’ve never had trouble thinking of ideas before.”

“And now it’s your turn,” he said. “We’ve watched you for over a month. We know what you can endure—what drives you insane. Entertain us.”

Everything that happened to her since her captivity flashed through her mind, but the immediate fear that she felt right now held it at bay. She grasped desperately for a memory—something that would be better than this fate, which would be anything. She would not surrender. She would not succumb. If she died here, then she would die fighting—and right now her only battle was to hold off the terrible fate that would have her turned against her own, betraying the only home that she had left.

“Drown me,” Zoya said. “Burn me. Pour scalding water over my back, rub salt in the wounds. Anything, I don’t care. Hurt me if you want—I’ve survived it before, I would happily let you do it again.”

“She would happily do it again!”

She would. It was true. If it would save her, then she would endure. Her heart was hammering violently, and Zoya knew that this was wrong—somewhere, she heard a familiar memory of a man sneer and tell her that she should be fighting harder, that she was pathetic for showing her enemies this weakness. She didn’t care. _He_ wasn’t here, facing the annihilation of his entire self.

“Please,” she ground out.

“What?” he asked. “Be more specific.”

“Burn me,” she said. “Take that Saintsforsaken knife and use it to burn me.”

Albrecht’s hand moved from her neck to her shoulder, his finger running across her jutting collarbone. She didn’t tear her eyes away from his superior, who only smiled at her. It was the worst thing that Zoya had ever seen, but it was followed shortly by the sweetest relief. He took the vial, holding it out to Nina.

“I suppose we all win today,” he said, drawing his own knife and ordering Albrecht to drag her to her feet.

* * *

Zoya considered turning back. Her own room was waiting for her, and for a long time she’d missed it more than anything. It would be nice to draw a bath and settle there, warm and weightless. But Zoya did not want to face that stifling stillness, the overwhelming silence.

If she wanted something to do, then she could march herself out to the pavilions, or to somewhere else by the lake that was more secluded. She practiced using her power often, and slowly her strength was returning to her. Zoya didn’t feel as groggy and thoughtless during the day, and from hour to hour she felt her stamina improve.

She turned the letter over in her hand, then sighed. She was being too sentimental.

Zoya raised her hand and pounded on the door, then crossed her arms as she waited. From inside, she heard shuffling, some muffled talking, and then the door opened.

Harshaw smiled when he saw her. He leaned up against the doorframe. “Oncat said that it would be you.”

“What else has Oncat said?” Zoya asked. “Did she tell you that I would be back? That I would live?”

“She said that this was probably the case,” he said. “I believed her.”

Zoya’s shoulders slumped. She’d forgotten how tall Harshaw was, towering over her by half a head, with lanky limbs and an indiscernible smile.

“You wanted to see me.”

“I sure did,” he said, brightening up again. “Come in. I’m glad you came now. I didn’t want to wait for too long, or send another letter to you.”

“You weren’t going to come see me,” Zoya said, as she settled on his sofa next to Oncat. Harshaw closed and locked the door, then draped himself over one of the chairs, crossing one leg over the other knee.

“Nope.”

In their years of knowing one another, Zoya had never quite decided what she thought of Harshaw. He was a friend, a brother in arms, but they shared something deeper than that. In the past Harshaw had referred to himself as Zoya’s boyfriend, and she had not disagreed. As for herself, she’d never gone so far as to put a name to what it was that passed between them. They had stayed together on the night before confronting the Darkling on the Fold, neither of them willing to be alone, and after that there were many times when Zoya had wanted to be alone, but found that she didn’t mind doing so in Harshaw’s presence.

“Do you want to go out for a walk?” Harshaw asked.

“Maybe later,” Zoya said. “It’s still early.” There were people out that she did not want to see.

“You missed me.”

“I had more important things to worry about than you.”

“Yeah, but you missed me,” he said, reaching over to pet Oncat. The cat stretched out on the sofa, taking up more space by that alone than Zoya did on the other half. “And Oncat. You don’t have to be thinking about someone to miss them.”

“Did Oncat tell you that, too?”

“No? I don’t need her to tell me that to know it.”

He shared a look with Oncat, fondly exasperated. “I wanted to see you, too.”

Zoya nodded. “Why?”

“Well,” he said, “I read some books that I wanted to tell you about. There’s another book that came out in Kerch that is completely insane. I cannot believe that that country can even function, considering that it’s run by lunatics.” He shook his head, sighing. “They wouldn’t know reality if it hit them in the face.”

“Another book,” she said. “When was it published?”

“Earlier this summer. I got a copy about a week after you went missing, and I thought—wow, it’s too bad that Zoya’s been captured because she’d think this was hilarious.”

She looked away from Harshaw, down to Oncat. Carefully she held her hand out to the cat. “I will have to read it. What else have I missed?”

“Nadia was wearing a dress at the summer fête that I thought would look better on you,” Harshaw shrugged. “It just looked more like your kind of thing.”

“Blue and silver?”

“Black and blue,” he said, “with silver lace over the boobs. I thought you would have liked it, and if you’d been there then it would have probably gone to you first. But it would have been a shame to waste good fabric on someone who wasn’t there.”

“Should’ve saved it for me,” she said. “It’s been too long since I’ve had the chance to just be pretty.”

“What are you talking about? You look great now. Especially with what you’ve done with the hair. I like the uneven look that you have going on.”

Zoya scoffed. “I don’t trust your opinion about hair.”

Her chopped hair still hadn’t been tidied, although Genya had offered. It just didn’t appeal to Zoya to hold still while someone touched her, even if it was her friend. She couldn’t remember why she hadn’t fought the Fjerdan women who had done it to her. It just hadn’t seemed important, then; there were more important priorities that she need to think about, and she was too focused on the fact that she would be back in Ravka soon. She hadn’t believed it—not really believed anything at the time—but she’d been more focused on the idea of it than on what was happening presently. What it meant that she was being prettied up, healed and fed, even if they left her with all of her scars. They were sending her home. The idea that she could be anywhere else had seemed too unreal then, and it still did now.

Absently, she reached up to touch what was left of her hair. It wasn’t so bad, now, if she pulled it back.

“I’m returning to my duties next week,” Zoya said. “I’m fine to start again now, but Nikolai insists that I wait for longer. I don’t know what he thinks a few days will change.”

“Think of it this way. A few _days_ in Fjerda completely wrecked you, and you were there for months.”

“You speak like you know what you’re talking about.”

“All torture’s the same. It doesn’t matter who does it.”

Zoya had thought similarly, once. She’d never been tortured before this, although she’d been wounded, but in her line of work she saw too many people who were the victims of a tremendous violence cross her path. Until it happened to her she’d thought herself desensitised. Had she not suffered already? Had she not been wounded? Zoya knew horror; had it wrenched from her since she was a child, watching Liliyana be beaten in that chapel for trying to protect her, while Zoya stood by helplessly—until she wasn’t helpless. She understood loss, as well, having grieved and feared, and she’d been injured in the course of battle. Pain was difficult, but it was a burden that Zoya thought herself capable to bear. She’d thought herself strong in the face of fear.

What was torture if not prolonged fear? What was it if not pain and grief?

She’d been such a fool.

“I’m ready for everything to return to how it was,” Zoya said. “All of this is infuriating.”

“What’s ‘this’?”

Zoya carefully allowed herself to lean back against the sofa, expecting a lashing pain to erupt through her back. It didn’t, but she grimaced anyway.

“The way that people speak to me. The way that they look at me, as though they don’t believe that I’m here,” she said. “You would think that I’ve died and returned a ghost, or been to battle and returned a hero.”

Harshaw nodded. “Yeah. It doesn’t really take a lot of effort to be tortured.”

“I’m sick of it. I want to return to how things were. There is never time for me to just be wandering through the palace like some romantic girl in a fairy tale. Now is the worst time for Ravka’s Second Army to be without a General.”

“I don’t know too much about what happens up top, but you’re probably right,” Harshaw agreed. “It was weird, without you here. But you aren’t going back to your duties until next week, so just get used to it and relax.”

He stood, stretching his long arms above his head and flexing his bony fingers. He rolled his shoulders, then held out a hand to Zoya. “Come on. We should go out and do something.”

“I already told you—”

“I don’t want to go to the Pavilions,” he said, “or to one of the courtyards. We can go somewhere else, where it’s quieter. Maybe the library?”

The library, where it was warm and still and silent.

“No.”

“Then we can go into Os Alta. It’s still pretty early, and at this time of the year there are still a bunch of places that will still be open. It isn’t autumn yet,” Harshaw said. “You missed most of the summer. Not fair that you should miss all of it.”

“Harshaw.”

“Come on,” he said. “You came here for a reason, didn’t you?”

“Yes. To see Oncat.”

A grin broke out across Harshaw’s face. He looked down to his cat, looking well-pleased with herself.

“Did you hear that, Oncat?” Harshaw said. “I _told_ you that Zoya wanted to see you, too.”

Zoya felt something warm stir within her, although it ebbed just as quickly as it had appeared, vanishing into the void as desolate as the silence that she was constantly surrounded with.

“She says that maybe you really don’t want to go out, and if that’s the case then it’s cool. We can just stay here until it’s dark out, then go find something to burn by the lake.”

“You’d prefer that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, of course.”

She should go into Os Alta. There was no reason that she should not want to. It was a familiar place, and she enjoyed spending evenings walking through the crowds—looking in at shops and treating herself to good food. She so rarely had time for such trite indulgences. After everything that she’d been through, she should want to treat herself, or let Harshaw treat her.

She didn’t, though.

“Setting things on fire sounds like more fun.”

“Good,” he said. “We’ll go out in a few hours. Wait here—I’ll go find that book that I told you about.”

Zoya nodded, although he’d turned away from her already, crouching by a pile of papers and books that he kept in the corner of his room like some deranged nest. She’d forgotten about his pile of crap, somehow. How? Had she ever really considered it before this had happened to her? Zoya couldn’t remember, and suddenly a surge of panic seized her. Why didn’t she remember that? It didn’t matter, though; it wasn’t important. She didn’t have to think about anything that she didn’t want to right now. It was over. It was better to just forget that any of this had happened at all, and to follow Harshaw’s lead.

* * *

They brought Nina back with them several times, and then one day she wasn’t there. Albrecht and his superior—Meinyerd, although she did not remember learning his name—walked into Zoya’s cell as they usually did, although today they did not lock the door behind them. With effort, Zoya managed to push herself to her feet before they could drag onto her knees, although it was difficult as today her arms were bound behind her.

“We’re doing something different,” said Meinyard. He gestured towards the cell door. “Walk.”

Today no bones in Zoya’s body were broken, although the bruising on her back that remained from the last time that she’d been whipped made it difficult to stand upright on her own. Besides that, hunger and being bound as she was had made her weak. She couldn’t walk with her shoulders back, as pain burned through the muscles in her chest when she tried, but she was able to raise her head and walk the short distance across the cell before Albrecht grabbed her elbow and jerked her ahead of him.

Her cell was cold and dark; the hallway was colder, but with lamps flickering every several doors. How many others were locked away down here with her? She often heard screaming, the sounds of footsteps in the hallway as the _drüskelle_ went to someone else. There was no way to know who else suffered with her; besides seeing Nina, she’d spent the entirety of her captivity with only the soldiers for company.

They brought her to a room with only a table and a single tall chair. She was ordered down on her knees, but Nina was not there and so they could not force her to obey. They still could, however, force her onto her knees, with a kick to her shins that sent her down. Albrecht grabbed a fistful of her hair, as he always did, and forced her head down.

“What do you have for us today, Witch General?”

Zoya snorted weakly. “You’re going to threaten to drug me and force me to beg you to hurt me instead. Then you will hurt me, just as you would anyway.”

“You’re catching on,” Meinyerd said, laughing.

“Maybe it’s complicated for you,” Zoya said, “but to me it’s just become predictable.”

“I think she sees our dilemma,” Albrecht said. He tightened his grip on her hair and her eyes watered. Zoya snarled at the floor, willing her arms to be free, useless.

“At this point I’m no longer convinced that this is worth our time.”

Zoya steadied her breath. If they were going to drug her now then they would have done so anyway. She was never in control of anything apart from herself—only ever playing their games.

“Put her on the table,” Meinyerd said. “Tie her down, just like we talked about.”

Zoya was pulled back to her feet and wrestled across the room. Albrecht put a meaty arm around her waist, dragging her across the room while she tried to twist away from him. She knew that it would do no good, and in the end she was right. The rope binding her arms was cut away, and one at a time both of her arms were forced over her head and secured to the legs of the table. The table was short enough that her legs fell over the edge, and in her current state even that was disorientating.

Meinyerd walk slowly across the room to join them. He looked down at her, shaking his head slightly. In his hand was the vial.

“No,” Zoya said, the word coming to her mouth mechanically. “Please. Don’t do this.”

She tried to twist her hands free, but that did no use. Her heart raced as he drew nearer, bringing the vial over her face so that she could see it. Zoya made her hands into fists, then lashed out with her leg. She was no longer flexible enough to kick it out of his hands, but she drove her knee into his side, distracting him.

He brought his elbow down hard enough on her side that two of her ribs snapped. As Zoya struggled to regain her breath, another blow landed on the side of her face, making her head ring.

“Did you think that would help you?” he demanded. “I’m done playing games.”

“No, you aren’t,” she wheezed. “You wouldn’t have brought me here if you weren’t still having fun.”

“Is this fun?” He grabbed her jaw, forcing her to look at him. She met his piercing gaze with a hard glare, her own anger simmering just beneath.

Finally, she closed her eyes. It took a moment to rearrange her thoughts into something that she could use.

It was humiliating, what they had her do, but Zoya told herself at the beginning that she would do anything that it took to get herself through this. Her thoughts strayed to Genya, who had lived as a servant for years and endured countless humiliations and indignities, long before the Darkling mutilated her. Zoya had hated her at the time for prostrating herself before the royals, and hated her more for enjoying her barbed comments with grace.

There would be time, later, when she made it back to Ravka, to be angry about this. To _hate_ this, and the men that did it to her. But she had to make it back first.

When she looked back again her gaze was steady but weak. “Please don’t do this to me,” she whispered. “Do anything else. I don’t care.”

“What can we do that we haven’t already?”

_Figure it out. You know that there’s no limits to the way that you can hurt me._

“Anything,” Zoya said. “I’ll let you do anything.”

His hand travelled up the side of her face, so that his thumb rested in the corner of her eye. “Shall I blind you? Shall I tear your tongue out?”

“You can only blind me once,” Zoya said, turning her face away from his hand. “If you take out my tongue then you can’t hear me beg.”

Did he think that she was so broken? She didn’t know, but whatever he thought of her he’d enjoyed the way that she’d begged and grovelled on previous days, laying her head at his feet and begging for mercy that wouldn’t come, for pain that she couldn’t withstand.

He brought his hand to rest on her bare arm, thin as bone, her skin cold as ice.

“Then give me better ideas.”

Zoya could think of nothing. She remained there, feeling more exposed than she had since her initial capture, although that wasn’t strictly true; she’d been this vulnerable for the whole of her captivity, and wore proof of that in the bruises and scars that covered her body.

“Whatever you want,” Zoya said. “Break my legs, or my arms. Bring Nina back and have her do something impossible.”

“Why are we making it complicated?” Albrecht touched her ankle. “We all know what it is that Grisha really want.”

Zoya closed her eyes, finally understanding. “Fuck me,” she said. “Rape me, make it hurt, do whatever it is that you’ve wanted to do since you first saw me.”

Meinyerd snorted, disgusted. “They’re all the same. Filthy, godless animals.”

“This isn’t about what we want,” Albrecht clarified, reaching for her calf. “It’s in your nature. You cannot be anything else, except for what you are.”

“Do it then. Please.” It was bad enough to beg to be hurt, but this was worse. As her trousers were unlaced and pulled over her emaciated hips, Zoya tried to cast her thoughts to anything else, landing on how the pain had shot through her so quickly and with such intensity that she could not think, holding back the shame as she screamed but didn’t even know it. This was different. No one believed that she wanted pain, even as she begged for it and outlined in detail what she would have them do to her, but this is what they thought of all Grisha. Seductive animal bodies that wanted to fuck and kill and destroy; to be used and conquered and burnt alive.

When Albrecht forced himself inside of her it hurt, although not as much as what else she endured. The act was familiar. Having her bones shattered all at once was not. It was possible, at least, to cast her thoughts towards something else—to disown the violence that happened between her thighs and the feeling of wood against her back, the sound of heavy breathing, and to instead find the sole comfort that she clung to.

Even if it hurt, it was a relief to know she was still enough herself to feel it.

* * *

Alone in her room with her eyes closed, the stillness pressed against her. The longer that she sat without moving, the more difficult it became to feel her own body. First her hands vanished, then her arms; her legs and then everything below the waist was not long to follow. She felt herself breath, but of all things it reminded her of laying pressed against Harshaw and feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest as he drifted to sleep. Behind her eyelids Zoya saw shapes form in the darkness, like writhing lights; when the knock finally came on the door, and Zoya snapped her eyes open, Zoya saw the distortions overlay across her bedroom until she blinked it away.

It was Genya, as Zoya had requested.

“Do you want a drink?” Zoya asked once Genya was seated on the divan.

“Maybe,” Genya said carefully. “Are you going to have anything?”

“A glass of wine, but it won’t do for me to return to my duties tomorrow, hungover.” Zoya had still not put on all the weight that she’d lost; just a glass would likely be more than enough to tide her over through the remainder of the evening, she hoped.

But if it wasn’t, the rest of the bottle was still there.

“There’s something that I need from you,” Zoya said, as she handed a glass to Genya. “It won’t do if I return to work tomorrow with my hair uneven.” _Even if Harshaw is endeared by it._

Genya’s face lit up. “Do you want me to give you a makeover? Pretty you up a bit?”

“I’m already beautiful enough,” Zoya said. “But I want to be taken seriously.”

Genya sipped her wine, then set it to the side. “Whatever you want. You should sit here… if I would have known that this is what you wanted then I’d have brought my kit, and maybe I could have given you highlights or something…”

“Just do this quickly,” Zoya said, holding the stem of her glass tightly in her hand. She sat down where Genya had been and watched as her friend pushed up the sleeves of her kefta, then disappeared out of sight behind Zoya. “I don’t want anything ridiculous.”

“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”

Zoya sat tensely as Genya pulled her hair out of the tie that she kept it in, then brushed it out so that it fell over her shoulders. She ran her hand through Zoya’s hair, close to the scalp and then down her back, to the tip of the longest piece. Zoya felt her breath become short, the scars on her back itching and bleeding again. She took a sip of wine. This wasn’t something that she’d expected to be pleasant. She had no right to be surprised.

“Let me just quickly do this,” Genya said. “You have such beautiful hair, I really love it when you let me style it…”

“Thank you.”

She tried to think of something else, anything. Harshaw. He’d been to see her the night before, and she turned him away. Why did she do that? She’d not wanted to be alone, but she’d wanted to bring him to bed even less. The thought now sent a pang through her. Usually when he came to see her it wasn’t long after that they’d be pulling clothes off of each other, and it had been this way since she’d first commandeered this room for herself. Yet he’d barely been interested in touching her when she went to see him earlier in the week, and when she’d heard him on the other side of the door the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d thought that there wasn’t enough room for Harshaw here, with how he lay himself across furniture and moved his hands so animatedly. The stillness wouldn’t part around him; it wasn’t darkness that could be dispelled by flame. Something would break if she’d seen him, and so she told him to go.

It would be better tomorrow, when she returned to her duties. Zoya wasn’t interested in being briefed about what she missed, but it would be preferable to the debriefing that she’d already endured, which had told her nothing. She was tired of being left out of knowing things.

Genya pulled Zoya’s hair to the base of her neck, and Zoya jerked forward. Her wine tipped out of the glass, splashing onto her lap and the carpet. She stared at it, shocked and confused, and then betrayed.

“Zoya?” Genya was asking. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Zoya said. “Just hurry up with this, would you?”

“Whatever you want,” Genya repeated, a low murmur. “Is it okay if I touch you?”

“You won’t make any progress if you don’t.”

Genya carefully lay her hands on Zoya’s shoulders. “I know,” she said. “I don’t want to startle you.”

“You say that as though I am a jumpy animal,” Zoya said. “I know what it is that I asked of you.”

“Right,” Genya said. “I’ll get this over with as quickly as possible.”

Zoya wanted to punch her. It was the first thing that she’d _wanted_ since returning, but she wanted to take Genya’s wrists and break them with the same ease that Nina had broken hers. She wanted to back Genya against a wall, corner her, scream at her—

She bit her tongue, and tried to ignore Albercht’s hands in her hair.

“What have you been doing lately?” Genya asked.

“I don’t know,” Zoya said, which was a stupid answer. She didn’t know—it was hard to remember. “I went down to the Pavilions earlier. Adrik was there.”

He was Nina’s age; they’d been classmates, once. If not for Adrik’s still-recovering disability, then he very likely would have been on the Wandering Isle when Nina had been taken. She was relieved that it hadn’t been him, but she wanted to hit herself when she thought of what she’d meant— _take Nina instead?_ At least if Adrik had been taken, then Zoya wouldn’t have known about it.

She carefully sipped her wine.

“How is he?” Genya was asking. “I haven’t seen him for a time.”

“Fine,” Zoya said. “Nothing interesting to tell you, I’m afraid.”

“That’s good,” Genya said. “I was always worried about him.”

“I’m sure that he would say the same about you.”

“I wasn’t a child.”

“He was sixteen. He didn’t want to stay to fight because he thought that it would be simple.”

“No, I know that. I don’t say that to insult him. I am happy to hear that he is okay,” Genya said, firmly. “He has had every support that he’s ever asked for, which is good. I want things to be okay for him. Everyone does.”

“ _He_ ,” Zoya said, lingering on the word for only a moment, “does not need anybody’s pity. Suffering is not rare in the Little Palace.”

“I suppose that it isn’t,” Genya said, finally pulling her hands off of Zoya. “Go look in the mirror. Tell me what you think.”

As always, Genya’s work was impeccable. Her hair was an even length, styled and layered. It hung only to her shoulders, but within a year it would be close to what it had once been, provided that she looked after it. Zoya touched it carefully, wrapping a strand of black around her finger, before turning back to Genya.

“That’s perfect.”

“Good to see that I still have it. If my talents are good enough for General Nazyalensky herself.” Genya’s smile looked uncertain, though. Forced.

“What?” Zoya asked.

“Is that everything that you wanted me to do?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Genya nodded. “If that’s what you want. I know that you said I’d done enough when I was here earlier, and I’m sure that you know what you want, but if you ever change your mind.”

“So that you can wash it all away?” A smile broke out across her face. “Bring me back to the way that I was before?”

“It isn’t that simple, Zoya, and you know it.”

“Of course I know it. You just want to help, though, so that you can rest assured that there isn’t anything vicious hiding under my clothes.”

Genya stiffened. “Zoya, this isn’t what I’m saying. You know that.”

“Then why are you so insistent?”

“I offered to help you,” Genya said. “Saints know that I would have wanted someone to offer.”

“You have David.”

“I didn’t always have him. I didn’t always have anyone.”

Zoya looked back down to her glass, which was mostly empty. She couldn’t stand the pitying way that Genya looked at her, with sympathy where there should have been anger, or at least annoyance. It annoyed Zoya more, on principal, that she’d looked away from her. She’d not looked away from anyone in Fjerda, and this was just Genya.

“Whatever,” Zoya said. “Listen—”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Genya said. “I would never force you to, and after this I’ll never bring it up again. But I just wanted you to know that the offer is there. I can help you, and I want to.”

 _You can’t, though._ Zoya felt a knot in her throat, but her eyes were dry. When she spoke, her voice was very even and flat.

“Thank you, Genya,” Zoya said calmly, “for tonight, and for the offer. I like what you did tonight. Really. I look good.”

At first Genya said nothing, but then she reminded Zoya of what she’d said earlier. “You were beautiful before I even lay a hand on you. Everyone wants to look like you.”

“I need to sleep, Genya. It’s late, and there’s a lot that I will need to attend tomorrow.”

“Right. Yeah. You don’t need me here nattering away,” Genya said with a light laugh. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well, okay?”

Zoya raised her glass, which was mostly finished. At some point Genya had finished her own. “I’ll drink to that.”

After Genya left Zoya stayed put for a moment longer, then poured herself another glass. She swallowed it quickly, grimacing at the taste as she forced down each mouthful. Tomorrow she needed to be awake early, and for the past several nights she’d not been able to sleep; although everything was silent to an oppressive degree, Zoya still swore that she heard the sound of trickling water, the ringing in her ears, footsteps on the other side of the door…

With shaky hands she unbuttoned her shirt and threw it on the floor, not wanting to touch it for another second. The wounds on her back chafed against it and Zoya couldn’t stand it. She let herself fall onto the bed, shivering, and then pull the blanket over her. For whatever reason, that didn’t bother her to the same degree—although her skin still burned, where once a different scar lay through her skin.

It wouldn’t be possible for Genya to do a thing about that without changing the shape of the scar that had been left by the tiger, and Zoya didn’t want her to try. She couldn’t even stand to think about that most of the time. Albrecht had never commented on the scar that was there when he whipped her, and when he ran his fingers over her back, burying his hands in her flesh, the only attention that he’d ever paid to her wounds were the ones inflicted during her captivity. Whatever came before that, signs of the life that she’d lived in Ravka, was of no concern to anyone.

Zoya still felt every injury on her back, every laceration. It burned brightly in the dark, cutting through her. She could not think of anything else.

Tomorrow she would return to her duties. That would help. It would give her something to do—something that mattered. Zoya needed something besides these long hours of waiting. She’d thought it unbearable in Fjerda: the anticipation of what was to come, and the gnawing dread that Nina would be there. It was worse now, knowing that it would never end. That she was meant to feel better for these long hours spent alone, resting.

If Liliyana were still alive, then it would be different. Zoya could have returned to Novokribirsk. Liliyana would have had something to say, if only she weren’t dead.

Zoya tried to recall any of her aunt’s wisdom, calling to it like she called to the sky, but only emptiness returned to her.

* * *

Albrecht finished and stepped back, leaving Zoya alone, bound to the table so that she could hurt and feel the cold air against her clammy skin. There was pain, buried behind a numbness that settled over all of Zoya.

Meinyerd stepped into view. He handed the vial off to Albrecht, with instructions to keep it safe.

“Is that it?” he asked, his voice even. He spoke with an authority that Zoya recognised, in everyone who ever expected to be listened to—anyone who wasn’t willing to tolerate disagreement.

“Is what?” Zoya snapped. “You saw everything that just happened.”

“I gave you a chance to see if there was any reason why we would lose something if you went the way of your friend,” Meinyerd said. “You revealed yourself to be nothing more than a common whore, which Ravka has in abundance.”

Zoya glared, but said nothing. Meinyerd slammed his fist on the table, next to Zoya’s hip, and on instinct she tensed.

She expected the worst, but was somehow still surprised when Meinyerd drew his knife and drove it through her forearm, in the space between those two bones, pinning her to the table. At first she didn’t feel the pain, but then it was all that she felt—the sharp wound in her forearm, and then the burning in her fingers.

Her breaths became ragged. Zoya looked up at the ceiling, breathing through her mouth and tasting the blood. There was nothing in her stomach that she could vomit, but she tasted bile at the back of her throat. After everything that had happened to her, it wasn’t fair that it should be this that would make her cry, but tears sprang to her eyes. She was trapped with the pain, literally held in place by this agony.

Meinyerd withdrew another knife, and walked around to the other side of the table.

Zoya whimpered as he raised it overhead, cringing away from the pain that she knew was coming. Her breathing was erratic, and she knew that she’d cried out.

The pain didn’t come, though.

Instead, Meinyerd lowered the knife, and with a lightness that mimicked any other gentle touch, he raised the blade against her bare arm and lightly traced her skin. The mock gentleness was infuriating as he brought the sharp edge of the knife to her throat, holding the tip of the blade against her jugular. It would just take one quick, jerking motion for Zoya to end this all right now, impaling herself on the weapon and bleeding out here. She knew that Meinyerd wouldn’t kill her—she was too useful alive, whether as a hostage or as a weapon—but Zoya also knew that she wouldn’t be quick enough to stop her if she took the only escape that had presented itself in many months.

Zoya had not endured every pain and indignity just to die right here, but very abruptly she was aware that she no longer trusted herself not to do just that. She was really crying now, not as an involuntary reaction to pain, the way that her eyes would water while she was whipped or how she’d scream when Nina inflicted that new power across her whole body. This was something completely outside herself, that she would never do if not for the pain that racked her entire body. It was fear and shame and a longing for the end of this, in whatever form that took.

She wanted to be safe. She wanted to no longer be in pain. And if she could have neither of those things, then she wanted to at least throw up to ease some of the nausea that continued to twist through her gut, leaving her lightheaded.

Meinyerd brought the knife away from her throat, lightly running it down her side and making it shiver, until he reached her hip. The moment that it was gone anger erupted through Zoya. _Why hadn’t she just taken the out while it was available to her?_

The knife travelled along her hip, down the outside of her thigh before circling over her knee and pressing against the edge of her kneecap. The construction of her lower body was painfully clear to her, and she just barely managed to resist twisting away from this precise exploration. When Meinyerd pulled the knife away and replaced it with his own hand, Zoya thought that at the very least she could brace herself against what was going to happen next. Another attempt to humiliate her. He’d rape her, or cut her. It would be more pain, more indignity, but it would not be something that could kill her.

Then Meinyerd drove the knife through Zoya’s stomach.

* * *

Once Zoya fancied herself liable to sleeping late, although she couldn’t imagine it now. She’d been awake for several hours before sunrise, bathed and fully dressed, waiting. For a time she tried to read, although her attention continued to flag. She was too on edge to fully allow herself to become engrossed in any of the romances that she’d left unread when she took her assignment to Fjerda, constantly aware of the emptiness behind her while she sat on the divan. The room was too big. Zoya no longer trusted the sense of isolation that pressed against her from all sides while she was here, and more often than ever before she found herself looking into the emptiness, bracing for something that never came. And it always felt like she was looking from the wrong perspective.

After a time she started pacing, and then waiting. By the time that the clocks struck seven bells, Zoya was more than ready to get out of this room and to go to literally anywhere else.

She went to the Grand Palace, of course, arriving at the war rooms at the same time as Tamar.

The Heartrender raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised to see you here.” She sounded impressed.

“I don’t fancy falling behind in my workload,” Zoya said, “nor do I like the idea of leaving everything to the rest of you.”

“Hey, now,” Tamar said as they continued walking the rest of the journey. “That isn’t fair, you know. We managed to get you back, didn’t we? You weren’t here to help with that.”

“My release was a cost that Fjerda was willing to pay, in exchange for a number of their own valuable prisoners,” Zoya said.

“Touché,” said Tamar. They reached the door to the war room. “You will have your work cut out for you, exactly as you expect. We need you.”

It wasn’t long before Zoya was sat around the table along with Nikolai, Tolya, and Tamar. Two other Grisha joined them.

One was a young Zemeni woman that Zoya had never seen before.

The other was Adrik.

She said nothing as she took a seat, simply crossing her arms and looking to Nikolai expectantly. He was aware of the intense weight of her gaze, but didn’t deem it necessary to raise his head away from the paper that he reviewed to look at her.

It was difficult to tell, but Zoya would swear that he’d aged in the time that she’d been away. He looked nearly the same as he always had, but something about the way that he sat was different. An exhaustion clung to his otherwise perfect features that had never been there before, making his skin sallower, his hair now more like gold than sunlight. He was still beautiful, Zoya wouldn’t deny that, but he no longer looked like the radiant beam of light that she’d once wanted for herself.

“Let’s start with Mr Zhabin and Miss Hilli,” Nikolai said, “so that they can be on their way to make whatever preparations are necessary.” He looked to Zoya. “You know Adrik. This young woman is Leoni Hilli.”

Leoni smiled brightly at Zoya, who returned with a cool glare.

“Adrik and Leoni having been training under me,” Tamar said. “They have both shown tremendous potential for undercover work, and this has been reflected every day since training began. Unfortunately, I’m no longer able to teach them anything. Anything else that they need to know will have to be learned on the field. The initial plan was to send them up to Fjerda to connect with one of our networks currently in place, but due to recent circumstances, we’ve really been looking at whether that would be the best option right now.”

Zoya scoffed. “What do you think has changed so much since I returned that it would ever be a good idea to pull out of Fjerda?”

“No one thinks that it would be a good idea to pull out,” Tamar said. “We’re just debating how much of a suicide mission this would be to go right now.”

Zoya studied Adrik carefully. He’d certainly grown from the boy that she remembered during the civil war to the young man that he was now, taller and more cynical. She didn’t know when it was that the change occurred, because she remembered so clearly how he’d tried to fight with her after she refused to bring him on that final campaign that she’d personally led, the one where she lost Nina. It had been an easy decision. He simply hadn’t been up to the standard of what it was that she wanted at the time, and she wasn’t going to bring him along just to spare him his feelings when he would have been nothing other than a liability if he’d been there.

“They’ll be expecting some kind of countermeasure from us,” Nikolai clarified, and Zoya snapped her attention back to him. “Revenge for what they did to you.”

“All the more reason that we should be careful not to relinquish too much of our hold on our networks up North,” Zoya said. “It’s always dangerous above the border, but what happens on the political stage is different to what it’s actually like on the ground.”

“They are not unrelated,” Nikolai said.

“Then that is all the more reason why we should be doubling down on our infiltration,” Zoya said. “Do you think that the Grisha above the border won’t suffer for this? If that’s true, then it will only be because they’re dead.”

“Is the alternative throwing Grisha at a lost cause?” Tamar asked, grinning tightly.

“Is it a lost cause?” Zoya asked.

“No,” said Leoni. “Not necessarily.”

Zoya, Tamar, and Nikolai jointly stared at her; Adrik pointedly looked at Tamar, while Tolya’s attention remained on his sister.

“I don’t know every single detail,” Leoni said, “but I just think that we should try to find out what the situation actually is before writing off this whole mission.”

“Yeah,” Adrik agreed. “It would be worth the risk, anyway.”

“Finally,” Zoya said. “Some common sense.”

“The problem,” Tamar said, “would be a two-fold complication that comes from the fact that Fjerda’s very touchy about who it is that they’re letting into their country right now, at the borders, but also that they’ve disrupted a lot of the usual methods for getting out…”

Zoya listened as Tamar outlined the problem, some pent up anger settling at the sound of Tamar’s even tone. These were solid facts to consider. Whether it would be Adrik and Leoni that actually made the journey north of the border now or in the future would remain to be seen, but there was real information about what risks they would actually be running if they travelled north. She had never launched a rescue campaign in Fjerda. At the time, immediately after the civil war, it had been too dangerous. Between all three members of the Grisha Triumvirate, Nikolai, and the twins, they had enough experience and coordination that they were able to build a plan of attack. Zoya had no idea why it was that she’d chosen to go to the Wandering Isle first, with Nina and others like her. Looking back, she supposed that she’d been thinking of Harshaw at the time, and the story that he’d told of what happened to his brother. For whatever reason that had lived with her, even long after she should have stopped thinking about it.

He’d travelled North after the civil war, not into Fjerda but to the border. When she’d visited him to announce that she would be travelling to the Wandering Isle to launch her campaign, he’d looked at her differently.

“That’s pretty stupid,” he’d said. “You should be fine, though. They might try to kill you, but I don’t think they know how powerful we can actually be. They don’t usually let Grisha live that long.”

“You are welcome on this campaign,” Zoya told him. “Your understanding of the area would be appreciated.”

“Thanks,” Harshaw said, “but I’m never going back there.”

In the end she had been fine. On that mission she’d lost two people: a young Tidemaker who was found murdered just outside of their camp, and Nina. For all the Grisha that she’d been able to rescue, it had been worth the price of losing Nina under such stupid circumstances. She’d thought so, at least, until she realised that Nina wasn’t dead.

She’d planned that mission not unlike how Tamar and her two spies were planning this, outlining the situation as it was and defending their ideas about how it would actually play out in practice. If anything happened to the pair of them north of the border, they would be entirely on their own. The Zemeni girl didn’t seem too bothered by that, although she wasn’t as blissfully ignorant and naïve as Adrik had been when he’d begged to be brought on that campaign; Leoni seemed willing to take the risk for what it was. And if Adrik never came back—well, he’d deserve it. Zoya wished that she’d lost him all of those years ago, rather than Nina.

With all of this new information on the table, attention returned to Nikolai.

“You know that Tamar doesn’t need my sign-off, right?” Nikolai asked. “I think that you have an opinion about what it is that you want to do.”

“I know what my instinct is,” said Tamar, “but that’s why I bring it to you. All of you. These are lives at stake.”

_Sometimes, you have to risk those lives. Are you saying now that you aren’t strong enough to do that?_

“Just as much as if we sit back and do nothing,” Zoya said. “This is the reality of the situation that we’re in. From a strategic perspective, I don’t see it as impossible. Or even improbable.”

She looked to Nikolai as she said this; he was only frowning further, in some weird hybrid of concern and annoyance. But for a moment she saw understanding written across his face. He was always so practical; so was she. Sometimes too much a romantic, sometimes in need of the cold facts, but that was why Zoya was here. She was his general. And so it disgusted her to see him measure her up like this, as though her points were somehow less legitimate just because she’d actually been to Fjerda.

There was a coolness on his gaze that Zoya did not understand as he looked away.

“No decision will be made today,” he said. “This is only about establishing the facts.”

 _Coward._ Zoya threw the thought as hard against Nikolai as she could, although it made no difference. A deep ache erupted from within her. It was like grief but for a time rather than a person. Once, decisions like this were easy. Things made sense. In the immediate aftermath of the civil war, before everyone had grown too comfortable with the way that they were running things and began to compromise on their visions for Ravka’s future, a decision like this would be easy. It was never safe in Fjerda. Adrik and Leoni were both as trained as they would ever be, and so it made sense to send them out there. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking of morals or a human cost.

_The Darkling was right about all of you._

* * *

When she looked down at her stomach she could not believe what it was that she saw. The knife jutting out from her. Blood erupting from the wound. It looked _wrong_. She couldn’t force herself to look away, although she wanted to more than anything. No matter how much she looked, though, Zoya could not connect what it was that she was seeing to the pain that now burned through her. She couldn’t believe it!

Although her breaths were heavy, the roof of her mouth tinged with the metallic taste of her own blood, Zoya felt remarkably calm as she looked at this, now that she’d stopped screaming. This was the worst thing that she’d ever seen in her life, and it hurt, but she didn’t really feel it.

She did not believe it.

Meinyerd and Albrecht were speaking. Zoya knew this, she heard their voices, she knew what words they were using, but their actual meaning made as much sense to her as the knife that was now inside of her.

Above her, she felt a tug on the ropes that bound her hands. It didn’t seem important compared to everything else, but a moment later the rope fell away and she realised that if she wanted to then she could move her right hand.

Very carefully, she brought her hand down to her stomach, ghosting her fingers around the wound until she felt the warm blood on her palm. That was _her_ blood. It should horrify to know that so much of it now flowed from within her, but at the moment that detail seemed unimportant. She reached for the handle of the knife, but Albrecht wrapped his hand around her wrist and pulled it away.

“You’ll bleed out if you take that out,” he said.

_I’m going to die anyway._

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Meinyerd said. “If you can free yourself, then we’ll bring you back to the Blood Witch and let her save your life. You want to see your friend again, right?”

Zoya stared at him, not comprehending.

 _“Do you want to live?_ ”

It was a moment longer before Zoya turned her attention upwards, to the other knife driven through the table. With a hand that felt too heavy, Zoya reached out and grasped the handle. She tried to pull it free, but as soon as she did a bolt of agony travelled through her whole arm, from the tip of her first two fingers all the way through to her spine.

Her hand fell away. She heard laughter.

 _You can’t do this. They never meant for you to get out of here._ Despair clawed at her throat. She’d been through worse, had suffered worse than this, but as she looked at what had happened to her she found that she couldn’t accept it. Being pinned here, stabbed mortally through the stomach after everything else that she’d somehow endured.

In that moment she understood everything. The whole world fell away, and the only thing that was real was the knife that had been driven through her wrist. When Zoya reached for the handle of the knife again, the feel of it was a comfort in her palm, as though it belonged there. It felt _right_.

Laying as she was, it wasn’t possible for Zoya to get the leverage that she needed to pull it free. The only way that she’d be able to get out of this was if she’d was standing, and could use the table itself to support her. Her legs weren’t bound to the table, and so she was able to roll to the side, pushing through the pain that just that movement caused until she was in free-fall over the side of the table. Her feet hit the ground and the shock of it radiated upwards through her legs.

She didn’t scream this time. There was no need for it. The pain was horrible, but it hardly mattered because it wasn’t real. The knife was the only real thing that was left in the world, and right now it was driven through her wrist and hurting her. Zoya had never felt pain like this before, even when Nina had done _that_ to her—this was longer, and more drawn out. It was inescapable, and ever changing. It wasn’t possible to adjust to. But it wasn’t real. If it was even happening to anyone, then it wasn’t to her.

Zoya grabbed the knife, and tried to pull it free from the table. A moment later she was leaned over the table, bracing herself against it so that she wouldn’t collapse, because the pain was too great. It was embedded too deeply within the table for her to just pull it free, and through all of this non-existence she was suddenly furious at herself for having not thought of that.

_What difference does it make? You have to do it, if you want to live._

She tried to prepare herself for what it would be like this time, although that wasn’t possible. As soon as she tried to move it even an inch, the blade moved within her wrist, alighting every part of her arm. But she didn’t let go, and she didn’t stop. It might hurt worse than everything, but the nagging sense that this _wasn’t fair_ chased away any preservation instinct that she might still have.

With a final pull, the knife came lose. Zoya could do nothing except collapse against the table, and then on the ground.

* * *

Frost began to settle on the grass, and at this time in the morning it glinted like shards of shattered glass. Zoya walked purposely through the gardens, towards the lake and then around to the forest. It had been a long time since she’d been here, but the path was familiar, like second nature. It was quiet this morning, but the sound of her feet on the grass was gentle. It didn’t feel like so oppressive to look through the mist across the lake, back to the Little Palace, and to not be thinking of anything.

The Darkling had kept a manor home in the forest. Once it had belonged to a noble family, before the Little Palace was ever even a concept, but over time it fell into the hands of the Second Army, where the Darkling made great use of it. His best Fabrikators were brought out here to study the structure of the building, changing the materials and taking down walls and ceilings. They would always be replaced, made of new materials that they’d invented in the laboratories, and so what remained of the manor now was an odd joining of ruin and the incomprehensible. Some walls were made of glass and reflected light across the rest of the manor. One floor was a mirror, and when the sun shone through the first time another room had caught fire. The structure itself was the worst combination of sturdy and brittle. Some areas had been there since Zoya had been a young child, having been built with Grisha steel or Grisha glass, while other rooms were fragile, with floors sinking or walls that were as much good at holding something up as a toothpick. It was a dangerous place, but a necessary place for training. It was here, as well, that the best of the Darkling’s Etherealki were brought for training. Zoya had maintained the tradition among the Second Army once she herself came into power.

Harshaw was already there when Zoya arrived. He didn’t look up until she was standing right in front of him, and then raised his head sheepishly, pushing himself to his feet.

“How long do we have?” he asked.

“Not as long as usual,” she said. “I need to be with Nikolai at noon.”

“Ah, that’s fine,” Harshaw said, waving his hand as though dismissing any concern. “We’ll be back with time to spare, I’m sure of it.”

“Is Oncat here?”

Harshaw shook his head sadly. “She wanted to sleep in.”

“Probably for the best,” Zoya said. “I would hate to kick your ass in front of her.”

“Now I know you’re lying.” He rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck first to the left and then to the right. “How long are you giving me to start?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said. “Long enough to make this a challenge.”

Harshaw grinned. “Won’t waste any time, then.”

He walked backwards a few steps, closer to the ruins, then turned and took off running. Zoya stood on her heel, watching him disappear. With parts of the wall decaying and collapsing, she could see flashes of red as Harshaw vanished further into the remains of the manor. Should she go after him now, or wait for a time? She crossed her arms, squinting at the building.

The rules of this challenge were simple. One of them was assigned to run, while the other gave chase. It only ended when the pursuer succeeded in catching the one running, or when one of them left the property of the building. Although it was generally weighed in favour of the pursuer, with two ways to win, it so happened that most games ended after the other was forced out of the house. Very rarely did the pursuer ever actually catch the one trying to outrun them.

Zoya had waited long enough, she decided. She sauntered into the ruins, drawing up her hands and feeling the air that ran through every inch of the place.

For a time she didn’t move, but instead just remained frozen, deep in focus. Once it had been easy for her to just feel where it was that the other person was in the building from the way that they cut through the air, and while most of her power was at the same level that it had been before her capture, finicky things like this were still difficult. It needed focus.

 _Clear your thoughts. Just listen._

A moment later she snapped back to full attention, and after lowering her hands, she took off running. Zoya knew where Harshaw was.

The floors under here feet were littered with rubble. She and Harshaw had been coming out here on a near-weekly basis when they were both available, and so Zoya had a pretty good idea about every obstacle in the long hallways. She jumped over the heavy rocks and pieces of wall that had collapsed over the years, either by exposure to the elements or a well-aimed attack from an Etherealki.

Right now Zoya was running towards the west flight of stairs. Harshaw was on the floor above her, stalking around in what had once been a bedroom. Although much of the north-facing wall had been destroyed, a balcony still remained that looked over a now-overgrown garden. He knew that she would be able to find him, but was clearly banking on the assumption that she used the east stairs to reach him rather than the ones that she was headed towards now. It was a pretty good first move: with the walls as open as they were, Zoya would easily be able to throw him out of the property, but if she ran up the east flight of stairs then she also ran the risk of Harshaw super-heating the air on her way up.

It had been Harshaw who suggested that they come out here to do some additional training, a few weeks after she’d returned to her duties. Zoya was only just settling into a rhythm again, having spent those weeks catching up with everything that she’d missed, and she’d not had time to see Harshaw much at all. It had been a surprise the evening that he’d shown up at her room, not wanting to be let in but instead wanting to train with her in the morning.

She’d accepted quickly. At every moment she had she was trying to draw on her power again, grateful to know that it was there, but unable to shake how wrong it felt to use it. If it were just a matter of stamina, then all of the work that she did in the pavilions would have been enough. Zoya had quickly gone from becoming breathless after only a few minutes of calling to the air, to being very nearly at where she had been before. Her physical strength was the only thing that was holding her back now, as that didn’t return as quickly as she would have liked, either. Still, every day she grew stronger, but the power remained distant. It was there, and she could call to it, but it didn’t seem interested in working with her anymore.

In the silence of her own room, with nothing but the claustrophobic air pressed around her, Zoya thought that she understood why. For the entirety of her captivity, she’d been unable to summon wind or call upon the part of herself that had always felt most natural—the part of herself that she’d depended on since she was a small child. In its absence, she had become something different, and now it felt like there was no room for this and what she’d used to be. The only place that she felt she belonged was laying alongside the stillness.

When she drew on her power now, it didn’t feel real, in much the same way that speaking to others didn’t feel real, when Genya looked at her so apologetically and when Nikolai looked at her as if to say that he’d always known that she’d come back alive—the idea that someone as strong as her could be finished was just laughable. It was all wrong in the same way that it would have been wrong to say Nina’s name out loud anymore.

Here, though, no one looked at her and saw the Squaller that was too powerful to be tortured. It was just her and Harshaw, and it didn’t matter that she still couldn’t do everything that she’d done before. She could still kick his ass. At first he’d won every round, because Zoya herself was too weak to run the way that she used to, but steadily she grew stronger and now they were basically evenly matched.

From above her, Zoya felt the air change as Harshaw started to burn something. Air was drawn into the vortex of the flame, and to her glee Zoya realised that she felt it. She wasn’t far now! Running, Zoya quickly turned down the next hallway and sprinted towards the stairs. Throwing open the door to the stairwell, Zoya’s momentum froze.

The stairs were all gone. What remained was simply a pile of rubble and ash that had once been the stairs, with a tower of air reaching up to the open roof into the grey skies above.

Laughing, Zoya clenched her fists, looking around for what her best option here was. She took a few steps onto the rubble, checking to see whether it would take her full weight, then looked up to the doorway above, that she’d meant to simply walk through. The rubble was about as sturdy as she could hope for, but there was no way that she could climb up to the doorway above. Her best option would be to find another way up, but by that point she had no way of knowing even where Harshaw would be, and it would take too much concentration to alter the air pressure and echo so that she could follow his movement through the ruin using just sound.

Zoya walked back out into the hallway, then sprinted straight towards the rubble. She leapt at the back wall, summoning a buffer of air to draw her higher than she could jump on her power alone, then pushed off from the wall towards the open doorway that led to the doorway on the up floor.

For a moment it didn’t look like Zoya would make it, but she grasped the side of the doorframe. This was a risk, as the overall structure of the risk was just so unpredictable, but in this case it paid off. The walls held her weight as she pulled herself through the door, grinning wildly to herself.

Then she took a step forward, and promptly fell through the floor.

* * *

The room where Nina lay curled against the far wall was not anywhere that Zoya recognised. The walls and ceiling were white marble, overall making it unbearable to look in any direction for too long. Zoya walked the whole distance while holding the knife in her stomach; the blade was the only protection against bleeding out. Her other arm was too injured to be any good to her, and instead simply hung at her side. Blood dripped down the end of her fingers, splattering on the ground. She didn’t have the strength to draw it close against herself, and didn’t want to. As much as was possible, it was preferable to forget about it.

The journey was slow and deliberate, each step becoming an effort. Neither of the _drüskelle_ touched her, leaving her to keep herself standing. If her pace slowed, or if she leaned against the wall to catch her breath, they let her. They just stood there and watched her as she willed the room to stop moving, knowing that if she didn’t reach Nina soon then it would not be long before her body was too weak to keep standing at all.

Zoya swallowed thickly as she was let into Nina’s room. From the corner, the lump of fabric and flesh moved, and soon Zoya saw the younger woman staring towards the door desperately.

“Zoya?” Nina asked. “Help me.”

It was difficult to speak, but soon became evident that Zoya didn’t have to. As she watched, Nina collapsed onto the ground, groaning and pulling at her stringy hair. Every movement happened in slow motion. She writhed, rolled against the wall and hit it until she fell weak. Then she turned back to Zoya, glaring at her.

“This will be you, one day,” Meinyerd said casually. “Go see if she can help you. Should I call her over here?”

As weak as Zoya was, she knew that it wouldn’t be possible for Nina to come to her. She was too weak; she was dying, but she had been since Zoya had first seen her here.

“No,” Zoya breathed.

“Do you think that she can even call upon her power without our help now?” He sounded so smug as he said it. Zoya stared at him blankly, and he smiled. It was horrible to look at, but he withdrew a vial from his pocket. “If you want to live.”

Zoya should have thrown it away from her. She should have, at least, wanted to, but she instead stared at the vial with the same urgency that she’d seen Nina look at the drug. Without Nina, then she would die. It was that simple, and Zoya had not come this far simply to let herself die. She took the vial, and forced herself to walk to Nina. Each step was harder than the entirety of the journey she’d just taken, but it gave her no relief to sink to her knees in front of Nina.

She touched Nina’s arm, and flinched when Nina jerked up to look up at her.

“Zoya,” she snarled.

“Here,” Zoya said, holding out the vial. “Take it.”

Nina needed no encouragement. She looked away, down to her ruined wrist. Zoya only looked back at Nina when she heard her sigh—all relief with no respite.

Both Grisha looked to each other. For a moment Zoya saw _Nina_ in that face, but through a prism of clarity that she’d never seen in the woman before all of this had happened. What fate had Zoya managed to spare herself from? If she was lucky, then she would never know, but in that moment she saw something startlingly brilliant in Nina’s gaze and she wanted to understand.

There was something that Zoya wanted to say, but she didn’t know what it was. Instead she touched the knife that was lodged in her stomach. “Nina,” she said. “You have to help me.”

Nina sat up, then grabbed the knife and pulled it from Zoya. She reached out, offering it to Zoya, and Zoya accepted it. Blood haemorrhaged from the wound now, and Zoya was too weak to care beyond a brief flicker of panic. Yet a moment later, Nina settled her hands on Zoya’s stomach and something within her changed.

It didn’t hurt, but it felt awful. The nausea resulting from blood loss lessened, and the pain in her stomach lessened. Zoya wanted this to be over; she wanted her own body back.

Nina looked up at her, and there was no uncertainty this time. Who gave a damn if Nina was being killed inch by inch, vial by vial? She recognised Zoya through the pain that suffocated every inch of her body; there was no reason why Zoya should not extend the same love to Nina, too.

Zoya was certain of only two things. Although the blood in her left wrist was no longer flowing so heavily, she was still very injured. She could barely make a fist with that hand, and when she tried to move her fingers at all it was agony. Now that she was here, she should ask Nina to heal that, before they dragged her away and left her with that wound to tend to; before they got it into their head to do the same with the other one.

In Zoya’s other hand was the knife that Nina had just pulled from Zoya’s body, and handed to her. It was good metal. Military-grade. It was sharp.

“Nina,” she said.

Nina raised her head to look at her, and Zoya took a deep breath to steady herself. She was still a soldier. Nina was still her responsibility, even here.

Zoya raised the knife, and drove it into Nina’s neck.

* * *

It was with a sickening horror as she fell that she didn’t realise what had just happened. The floor had been right there, she’d made it to the upper floor, and then the floor was falling out beneath her. In the moment that she’d put her foot down, she’d realised that it was more waterlogged than she should be comfortable with, and had felt it shift into a new position. Still, the fall itself happened too quickly. At first she didn’t even know where she was—just that she was on the ground, sore and covered in dust and the remains of cracked, rotting floorboards. When she turned to look up at where she’d just been, she saw a direct line of sight to the ceiling above her. Zoya raised her hand to brush away the dust and grime that now coated her face and hair.

The taste of bile rose in the back of her throat. She’d not fallen on her back, so there was no reason that she should feel winded, but it was difficult to draw a breath all the same. Her heart was pounding in her head, and she thought that she could hear water dripping. The smell of rot and damp wood was overwhelming, but it didn’t smell like it was real. But she smelled blood, and was certain that this was real.

Zoya braced herself on one elbow, then tried to push herself up. She heard the bones shift in her arm before she felt the pain, but when she caught up to what was happening it was all that she felt.

In the cold morning, as frost began to melt in the gardens surrounding this ruin, Zoya screamed. She screamed as loudly as she could, throwing back the stillness suffocating everything. She screamed as if it could hold back the horror of what had just happened, the wrongness of it all. The feeling of her arm was just as overwhelming as all of those memories of being hurt, but the pain of the break and of the knife that had impaled her and the beatings that she’d taken in the cold because there’d been no other choice was worse than she could remember.

“Zoya! Hey! Nazyalensky!” Through the blood pounding in her head Zoya heard the crunch of footsteps cracking the wood beneath them. At some point Zoya had stopped screaming, and was now just whimpering.

She swallowed hard, raising her head to look to where Harshaw was walking towards her. Everything was too loud now.

“Zoya?” Harshaw asked. “Fuck. You look bad.”

“Get it out of me,” Zoya managed to say, reaching for her wrist but unwilling to look at it. Harshaw just kept walking closer.

“Let me see,” he was saying. “Didn’t expect the floor to just give out like that.”

“Harshaw,” she hissed.

He knelt at her side, shoving a piece of the floor that had fallen on Zoya’s legs away from her. Just the release of that weight was a relief, and she wasted no time shifting around just because she could.

“Let me see the arm,” he said, and she glared at him.

“Go fuck yourself,” she snapped. “Get away from me. I don’t want to see you again in my life.”

“Stop being so dramatic,” Harshaw said, giving a weak laugh. He took a seat next to her, crossing his own arms over his chest. “I’m not going to leave you here if you’re hurt.”

Zoya looked down the hallway, from where she’d just run. “You’re going to be hurt if you try to touch me.”

“Then I won’t touch you.”

Her eyes were damp. With her uninjured hand, she wiped at her face with the back of her wrist. She didn’t care that she was smearing dust across her face.

There was nothing behind her that she could support herself against, and she didn’t dare lie down. The idea of doing anything seemed like an impossible luxury that she didn’t dare to assume that she had.

“Do you want me to go get help?” Harshaw asked. “Tolya or Tamar, or someone.”

“No,” Zoya said. “Just let me think.”

“Well, what are you thinking about?”

“I don’t know, Harshaw!” she snapped. “I don’t know what I should be doing right now. This can’t be real. It isn’t.”

“What isn’t?”

Angrily, she gestured at her wrist. He leaned over to take a look, wincing as he saw it. “That is real, Zoya. But it isn’t that bad. It won’t take much to heal.”

She wasn’t really this hurt. She couldn’t be. Even at the time, it had just been an injury. That was the only thing that mattered. The pain didn’t mean anything. If it had, then its meaning would be fatal: it would not be possible to hurt that much and to still live, unless the pain was its own end. In the worst moments it had hurt so much that she hadn’t even been afraid.

Other times she was very afraid.

“Have you ever heard of _parem_?”

“No.”

“It’s a drug that the Fjerdans had,” she said. “It’s for Grisha. It does something to our power, and ruins us.”

“Did they get you with it?”

Zoya barked out a nasty laugh. “You do not understand what I mean when I say _ruin._ ”

“Ah,” said Harshaw, as though he got it finally.

“They threatened to use it on me,” she said. “I would have been _nothing_ after that. I wouldn’t have died, but I would have been nothing like myself. Everything that I am would have been gone. It would be worse than dying.”

Harshaw nodded. “Good thing that they didn’t.”

“I don’t think it was a real threat,” she said quietly. “But it felt real. I wasn’t going to let it happen to me. They showed me a Grisha that was drugged with it, and she was nothing like she had been. It would have been kinder to be dead.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Sometimes it is.”

Zoya nodded. After a moment she slowly lowered her arm down to her lap.

The break was notable, but there were no bones tearing through the skin nor any knives jutting through her. It hurt, but it wasn’t the pain now that made her want to cry. She refused, though.

“I need to get this taken care of.” The last thing that she wanted right now was to go seek help, even if it would help the pain. She wanted to be alone in her room, or with Harshaw and Oncat in his. Not here. Not where anyone could see her. Not near anyone who would lay a hand on her.

“Can you walk?” Harshaw asked.

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, pulling his kefta over his shoulders and then began pulling off his shirt. “Let me wrap that against your chest so that it doesn’t hurt too much while you walk.”

Zoya tucked her legs up, grimacing as she moved her wrist. He wanted to bind her arm, and she would not let herself be made that helpless again. Especially not with a broken bone, when she knew how horrible the pain was of having a broken bone bound like that.

“No,” she said. When he looked at her, she added, “I won’t let you.”

“It’ll hurt more if you don’t.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” he said, pulling his shirt back on. “So you can either let me help you walk out of here, and say that you’ve won, or I’ll just have to throw you out of this place so that I can win.”

Despite herself, Zoya snorted, then rested her hand on Harshaw’s arm.


End file.
